The Attack on the Tuileries
fate. The National Guard had been suborned; the City
Hall would be seized, the palace stormed. It only awaited
the hour and the tocsin. Then from the bridges over the
river, by way of the Louvre, from the rue St,-Honore,
back of the riding-academy and the Convent of the Feuil-
lants and from the gardens, they would come, the march-
ing columns, the men of the faubourgs, the wild men of
Brittany and Marseilles.
Over the palace forces, Napoleon observed, hovered an
air of indecision. Through the lofty lighted windows he
saw the white head-dresses and shoulders of the ladies in
waiting, the wigs and neck-cloths of the gentlemen. It was
significant—only heads, heads without bodies, floating
distractedly to and fro. This dramatic foreshadowing,
however, did not interest Napoleon so much as the elan of
the troops. The militia ranged in the garden of the palace
slouched listlessly on their muskets; those on the bridge-
head of the Pont Royal, the only approach by way of the
river, surlily obeyed commands; and the cavalry by the
rue du Louvre, a few hundred yards to the east, seemed
similarly disaffected.
Here, at the corner of the Long Gallery, which ran
parallel to the Seine, at right angles to the Tuileries, and
connected that palace with the Louvre, he heard the rip
of saw and the scrunch of wrenched planks. He mounted
the high step of an old house. They were tearing up the
floor so that the attackers could not rush the Tuileries by
the Long Gallery after they had gained the Louvre. But
the gap was only six feet. It could be leaped!
Napoleon made his way toward the main entrance of
the palace, approaching it from the Carrousel. Again
from a place of vantage, he could see those within the